Buena Park has extended a moratorium on short-term home rentals by nine months so it can finish writing rules to cover the new industry, angering local hosts who already have their own micro-hotels, and an extra source of income, up and running.

City planners say Buena Park never allowed short-term rental of residential housing to begin with, and they need more time to craft an ordinance and get a permit scheme that balances the needs of both proprietors and the residents of neighborhoods where they want to do business.

The City Council, at a meeting Aug. 13, voted unanimously to extend the moratorium, which started in May, until May of 2020.

During that meeting, members of an organization of local hosts, the Buena Park Short Term Rental Coalition, held up signs with messages such as “Without STR (short term rentals), tourists won’t come” and “School loans are high, STRs help pay.”

The debate has turned Buena Park into one of several Orange County cities working to create rules for hosting travelers in single-family homes or banning the practice outright.

Running a bed-and-breakfast with Airbnb, VRBO and other short-term rental sites is yet another category of self-employment that has proliferated in the so-called gig economy, in part because city laws never contemplated the blend of residential and commercial activities. Others examples are apps that enable people driving their own cars to become chauffeurs (Uber) and couriers (Postmates) as a way to bolster their income.

Cassandra Elliott, who helped found the coalition of hosts in Buena Park, started receiving Airbnb guests in her home’s granny flat in March. She hosted a mix of people visiting to vacation at local theme parks and workers staying overnight for regional business meetings before taking down her listing in June.

Elliott is concerned that she and other hosts will lose income while the city drags its feet to hash out an ordinance.

“We have people who have had to sell their houses. It’s how they were making ends meet,” Elliot said.

“I think the city is trying,” she added. “We just want them to try faster.”

Community Development Director Joel Rosen said there were as many as 100 hosts operating in the city before the moratorium began in May, and that by this month the number was down to about 35. He added that about half of the hosts stopped taking customers after the city sent them cease-and-desist letters.

Rosen said the city’s first moratorium, which was to last 60 days, didn’t give his department enough time to finish a set of rules for hosts. Among other things, the new rules will require hosts to get a permit from the city and pay a 12% hotel tax.

The ordinance also will restrict rentals to one per 300 feet (five to six properties apart in an average Buena Park neighborhood) and require that a host or agent be available to attend to guest problems any hour of the day or night, Rosen said.

Rosen expects an ordinance to be written and ready for the city council’s consideration within a few months.

The moratorium was spurred by complaints lodged since the start of last year about guests staying at properties owned by nine hosts in the city. Those complaints included what Rosen described as “pretty egregious examples (of bad behavior), whether they’re wild parties or police arrests.”

The city has sued a pair of hosts, Liem and Ngo Nguyen, complaining that their guests were noisy, littered, and took parking away from neighbors. In its lawsuit, Buena Park described the Nguyen’s Airbnb as a “public nuisance” that affected the health and safety of the neighborhood.

As of Wednesday, Aug. 21, the city had cited the Nguyens 25 times, a collection of fines and penalties totaling nearly $16,000. Rosen said repeat complaints drove the citations, but the city has not fined the Nguyens, whose home is a few miles from Knott’s Berry Farm, since May.

Elliott argues that complaints against short-term rentals are overblown. She said there are relatively few hosts in Buena Park, and only a fraction of them have received complaints.

Since the city began developing a draft ordinance in 2016, it has also contracted with a short-term rental data company, Host Compliance, to monitor sites such as Airbnb and VRBO to help identify addresses of Buena Park hosts. The city spends about $2,000 a year for the service.

But the city and coalition of hosts can agree on one thing: Hosts should be local.

“We don’t want owners who are states away, and not able to take care of and manage their property,” Elliott said. “We don’t want to change the neighborhood’s sense of community.”

Ian Wheeler is a data reporter. He began his journalism career at Cal State Fullerton's student newspaper, the Daily Titan. He started at The Orange County Register in 2013 and has filled several reporting and research roles since then. Recently, he's specialized in data reporting, processing spreadsheets till his computer crashes.

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